•’My goal is to make Enugu best state in Nigeria’
By Onochie Anibeze, Saturday Editor; Ochereome Nnanna, Chairman Editorial Board; Wale Akinola, Sunday Editor, & Clifford Ndujihe, Politics Editor
Enugu State Governor, Dr Peter Mbah, was literally shooting from the hips in an encounter with a team of Vanguard editors, on Thursday morning. Pressed for time, he, in exactly 48 minutes 25 seconds, spoke on the core reasons he defected from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, to the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, on Tuesday. He also shed light on how his ‘disruptive innovation’ policy has changed the socio-economic landscape of Enugu through over 2000 projects in the last 29 months, and how partnering with the APC at the centre will unleash more developments on Enugu in particular and the South-East geo-political zone generally.
We have always known you as somebody who has strong morals. How morally right is it for you to leave the party that gave you a platform for another party? Why do you think Enugu people will return you to office after leaving the party that enabled your election?
I think your question is a fair concern. But what we have done in Enugu State is that we have elevated service beyond politics. We are not into the politics of theatre in Enugu. We are in the politics of service. At all times, what would guide our decision would be whether we are able to best serve our people. Our allegiance is not to the colour or the logo on a flag. Our allegiance is to the people of Enugu State, who, in the first place, entrusted us with their mandate to serve them.
Stronger platform
What we have simply done is that we are carrying that trust with us to a stronger platform where we can serve them best. So, this is a case of service. If you look at our mission statement when we were campaigning for office, what we said is that we are going to provide quality, people-centred, people-focused governance. And that we are going to make Enugu State the number one state in the country in terms of living, business, tourism and investment. That still remains the focus.
If we have a system or if we believe that the system on which we campaigned and won elections is no longer serving us optimally, I think it is incumbent on us to seek for a stronger platform where we can continue to deliver service and results to the people, who gave us their mandate to serve them. So, it is beyond anyone, it is beyond personality. It is about principle, and we try to elevate service beyond self or personal interest.
If we believe that a system no longer provides fairness or accountability, then we must elect to make that difficult choice. Because if it were just for my ambition, I would rather stay with the familiar, isn’t it? But it goes beyond my personal interest.
Are people at the grassroots willing to follow you on this journey to the APC?
There was quite an extensive consultation. If you had followed what happened in Enugu a few days ago, you would notice that it was a movement from the grassroots. Those people you sawt at Okpara Square were not rented crowds. You are talking about councillors from the 260 electoral wards that represent the various communities we have in this state; chairmen of the 17 local governments we have; members of the House of Assembly; party executives and officials. It was a collective decision and was not whimsical at all.
This is the first time Enugu State is having a government run by APC. like some governments in the South-East, you have taken your state to the APC. What exactly is the benefit?
I am glad that you raised that point because it was part of the consideration for us. For me, personally, I think that we have never been so fragmented politically in the South-East as we are today. I actually do not think that it is politically in our best interest as a people, as Ndi Igbo. Now, if you look at the last 10 years or so, you would notice that, and maybe I should just cast your mind back to when we started off as a nation. This nation was built on a tripod. You have the three core tribes that provided the platform on which this nation was built.
You have Kaduna to the North, which represents the Hausa. You have Ibadan to the West, which represents the Yoruba. Enugu to the East, representing the Igbo. If you also look at the order of protocols over the period, whether from the First Republic, the Second Republic and, indeed, the Third Republic, you will notice that we are never outside the first three orders of protocol in terms of hierarchy.
But in the last 10 years, it appears as if we have been completely displaced or dislocated. You would have to struggle to find us maybe in the fifth or sixth number when you talk about the order of protocol in the country.
Also, if you also look at the politics that our forebears played, those people that we have so much respect for were always more than happy and willing to have a handshake across the Niger whenever it became expedient. You could go as far back as Mike Okpara. He was elected under the National Council of Nigerian Citizens, NCNC. When it became expedient to have a handshake, he did with the Action Group. And that was how the setup occurred in what became known as the United Progressive Grand Alliance, UPGA.
We have never been so fragmented. If you look at the Second Republic, when we had just Anambra and Imo states, we were both in the Nigerian Peoples Party, NPP. Anambra was NPP, Imo was NPP. If you again look at the Third Republic, when we had the National Republican Convention, NRC, and the Social Democratic Party, SDP, with the exception of Anambra, which had Chukwuemeka Ezeife in SDP. Evan Enwerem of Imo was in the NRC.
Okwesilieze Nwodo of Enugu was in the NRC. Ogbonnaya Onu in Abia was in the NRC. So we have never been this fragmented as a people. I think we need to begin to rise above personal state politics. We need to start thinking about the collective interest of Ndigbo. And being consumed by emotion won’t cut it for us. We have to be smart, nimble and sagacious. We have to think ahead. We have to understand that politics is about positioning. You are not going to wish any role into existence.
Igbo must think smart, plan ahead
You have to plan ahead. You have to think smart. So I think that is what this is also for, in my view. We need to end these distorted multiple or fragmented political units that we have. I mean, how do you explain five states in a region belonging to four different political parties?
Won’t you and others’ defections to APC drive Nigeria towards one party state?
I think it is a narrative that is being framed. The truth is that we still have quite a strong opposition. People are coalescing, constituting themselves to a different political party.
Just recently, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, approved 11 new political parties. We also have people from other political parties coming together to forge an alliance. I think that for any politician, the day you stop thinking about the interest of your people is the day you begin to compromise that.
For us, whenever service, whenever fairness, whenever accountability is compromised, we are always ready to have the courage to choose accountability, fairness and service. As long as those are the things that are in issue, we would always elect to adopt those.
On governance, how far have you gone on infrastructure, education, healthcare, agriculture, social service, etc?
Perhaps, you want to hear about what is now referred to as the 24 months of wonder. We are currently doing about 2,000 projects in the state. None of these projects is knee-jerk, they are all carefully planned projects that we committed to from day one.
Social contract
If you go back to our manifesto, you look at that paper, it is not just an ordinary paper, for us. It is a social contract that we have with Ndi Enugu. During our campaign for office, we highlighted a blueprint for Enugu, which is contained in that document. So, all the interventions across sectors are in that document.
Citizen charter
Two hours after taking my oath of office, the first executive duty that I performed was to sign Executive Order 001, which speaks to citizen charter. Again, reinforcing in a legal form those commitments that are contained in the manifesto. Holding myself to account that this is a contract that I have signed with you, and I will leave up to my own purposes.
Growing Enugu economy from N4.4b to N30b
We made very consequential announcements during the campaign. The one that you probably have heard several times is growing the economy exponentially from N4.4 billion to N30 billion; eradicating poverty and making Enugu the number one city for investment and living.
Everything we committed to, those commitments are actually quantum leaps. If you look at the way our growth pattern had been, you would question how on earth do you want to grow at a 27 per cent cumulative annual growth rate, if in the past you had only grown at four per cent?
Disruptive innovation
It requires that you have to do things differently. Recognising that the system in the past may have served us, but in order for us to leapfrog, we need to do things differently, and we need to innovate, which is why we refer to it as disruptive innovation. Then we talked about eradicating poverty. Achieving a 0 per cent head count in our poverty index from 58 per cent, which was the poverty head count rate. Achieving zero hunger and zero per cent poverty rate were also not easy. Of course, we did not make those announcements because they were fancy, and not being mindful of the challenges. We knew all that we had to come and deal with.
Private sector input
We started off by saying, if we have to grow this economy, that growth must come from the private sector. We must be able to attract private investment. We have to unlock private capital. How do you unlock private capital if you have such huge security challenges? Private capital would never accept security risk. They can accept financial risk. They can accept commercial risk. But not a security risk.
Also, they are not driven by emotion and say, because Enugu is the heart of Igbo land, the Igbo should take their inestments there. Private capital don’t listen to mission and vision statements. They go to where it is safe. They go to where there are returns on investment. So, we immediately set forth at dawn. Three days into our government, we made the very consequential pronouncement to end the so-called Monday sit-at-home.
Ending Mondays sit-at-home
It was almost thought of as a joke because it was not like a place anybody dared to delve into. But we remained committed to ending the sit-at-home. We mobilised the security forces. We also now deployed technology, building what is today known as the best security surveillance system. And I am not sure we are second to any in the continent in terms of our security surveillance system in the city. And in fact, in the entire state.
Command and control centre
We have the command and control centre that gives us a line of sight of what is going on across the state. And these cameras are all artificial intelligence, AI-embedded. They have capability to identify faces and plate numbers of vehicles. So even the ones that are in the forest, at night, we are able to identify these bad people. And we basically developed our capacity to track crime once it is committed, identify the culprits wherever they are running and to ensure that we bring them to justice.
So whereas we cannot talk about a zero crime rate, we have built the capacity to resolve any of the security breaches that occur in our state. And crime rates have dropped significantly by over 80 per cent. And just the thoughts that you have built this capability also puts these criminals out because they know that there’s no hiding place for them in Enugu. There’s no room for crime in Enugu because we will get you if you commit a crime here, we will find you and ensure that you are brought to justice.
Sophisticated surveillance
When you talk about surveillance systems, it is not just the static one. All our vehicles have security surveillance cameras so they are also doing the surveillance as well as the static one, and those cameras have facial recognition capability.
It also has a number plate recognition capability. So you can’t really, like, get away. Just driving by a mobile camera, they get information of the vehicle. They get the details of whether your licence is up to date, whether, you just changed your colour, the original colour. A lot of information in the dashboard of all these vehicles you see out there. So when they pull over a vehicle, they are pulling that vehicle over because something has been flagged up. Of course, we had to start thinking about how to bring the investors.
Attracting investors
We created a one-stop shop because we wanted to have an ease of doing business. You also know my background is business. One of the things that I felt if I ever have the opportunity to serve, I would ensure that we eliminate multiple handling within the public service, and we can make life easier for businesses if we have a one-stop shop where a business goes to obtain its licences, approvals and permits, building permits and all that, which is what we have created here, and we have an influx.
As part of our governance philosophy, we do quite a lot of collaboration with the private sector. So we are quite heavy on Public, Private Partnerships, PPP. We have a lot of assets that we need to work with private investment to activate.
N100bn pragmatic farm
We brought in the Pragmatic Farm that injected N100 billion to work with us at our United Farm Products Limited. We also have the investor, who came in also to partner with us to activate the Sunrise Farm, injecting N40 billion investment.
Activating moribund assets
On our own, we also went on to activate all our Moribund assets. We got the Hotel Presidential back on stream. So it is a functional hotel now. The International Conference Centre was an abandoned project, we got it completed. Again, these things are not knee-jerk.
3 million visitors
They are also designed to achieve certain objectives. For example, if you go to our manifesto, we said we want to bring in three million visitors into Enugu. Then you cannot wish that number into existence. There are lots of fundamentals you need to put in place.
You need to be able to think about how to move 3 million people. If you do the calculus, that means you have to get 250,000 every month. If you break that down further, you are talking about close to 10,000 people every day. So how many aircraft do you have coming into Enugu on a daily basis? Barely six or seven, so you need to move that number to eight. Do you have the facilities? What are they? So we don’t just make the statements loosely. We also look at the fundamentals. Do you have the keys to take that number? Do you have hotels? Do you have the locations that would attract them? What are the pull factors you have created?
Business is an economic activity. And we became frontal across these sectors, whether it is the investment, the trade and industry. We were bringing in quite a lot of people. We need to operationalise the international wing. We need to expand and then we got investors working with the Federal Government.
Airport concession
The Enugu airport was not part of the airport that was listed for concessioning. When we came in, it was not. But we had to push for that to be included because we knew the value of getting that place completed and operational. We got it under what is referred to as an unsolicited bid and began to engage the federal government with investors. Today, if you follow the news, the Federal Executive Council has approved the concessioning of that airport. Hopefully, before the middle of next year, that wing of the airport should become fully operational.
Aviation hub
What does that do for us? We now have other airlines coming in. We want to make here an aviation hub, a regional aviation hub. So you are going to have other major international carriers outside Ethiopian Air coming into this airport. The consequences of the corollary is that we will have other local airlines coming to this our airport.
We also didn’t have to wait for investors, we set up Enugu Air and brought in three aircraft. Before the end of the year, we will bring in six additional aircraft. This is making access into Enugu easy, and ensuring that our passengers are not exploited.
Agriculture as serious business
If you look at agriculture, it is one area we believe play a major role in our GDP so we didn’t want to treat agriculture as food security but as a serious business. That is why the first thing we did was to set up farm estates to ensure that we don’t expose commercial farmers to those coming in to do commercial farming. We go to communities to donate land freely to the state government. so these commercial farmers don’t need to go to the community they go straight to the state government for land where they farm. For our small holder farmers, we decided to build a farm estate the project is still currently ongoing. We are doing 260 farm estates.
7,000 classrooms, smart schools
Think about it, we are doing about 7,000 classrooms in two years. But it is not even just about building classrooms, it is the classrooms’ features. For example, a typical smart school features a robotic centre, an artificial intelligence centre, mechatronics and a practical skill centre. You have the ICT hub, e-library, the building is powered by a 65 KVA solar system, so you have 24/7 electricity. The place is internet enabled. You have a high speed internet access because a lot of what we do there is based on e-learning platforms. It is not even just about these great things I have described and the beautiful environment we have also built, if you look at the design of each smart school that is enclosed to take care of the kids from early child learning all the way to basic nine, what used to be known as JSS3, all that is changed. But it is not just about changing the labels. We have also changed the pedagogy. So we have moved from what used to be known as a rote system of learning to an experiential system of learning. We have moved the children from seeing their learning method as memorisation or repeating what they have been taught. As they see today, their learning environment is a creativity hub.
They see themselves as problem solvers. They look at the compelling social problems they have and provide solutions.
Spencer Foundation education grant
If you look behind you, you would see the Centre for Experiential Learning and Innovation, CELI, and we just won the Spencer Foundation Vision Grant, an award that enables us to empower our teachers. The Spencer Foundation Grant is a special fund only 10 institutions get in a year. We are fortunate to be one of them across the world.
What the Spencer Foundation Grant help us to do
To strengthen our capacity to deliver experiential learning so that we are not just building classrooms, we are not just providing digital tools, but we are also equipping the teachers with a skill set to be able to train these kids. If you have done very well in the bricks and mortar, digital tools, and you do not have the teachers that will deliver this quality learning, then you have also not done so much because the kids will not be better than the quality of teachers they have. So we are spending so much in that area.
Hopefully what you are going to see in Enugu, maybe not in the lifetime of my government, maybe long after we have left the scene, these impacts will begin to be felt. But the objective is that 10-20 years from now, when you talk about the Enugu child, we will be talking about a tech savvy child, who is imbued with the evolving 21st century skills. So for me, that’s the only hope we have for the future. Because the rest of the world will not be waiting for our children.
260 primary healthcare centres
The same measure is extended to healthcare. In the healthcare space, we are also doing 260 primary healthcare centres, which is the equivalent of 3,380 hospital beds in the 260 electoral wards in the state. We are equipping them with all the tools that are required to have a functional primary healthcare centre. But I am also making sure that they are well-staffed. Because the major challenge we found out was access to healthcare personnel, so we approved the recruitment of 2,500 healthcare personnel. When we came in, we did a gap analysis. We found out that we have over 2,000 gaps in our staffing.
So we immediately approved the recruitment of the community health extension workers, the nurses, the midwives and doctors for these hospitals will be well-staffed. That’s just in the primary area.
We have also intervened in the secondary and in the tertiary space. We are building what will become the best hospital in the state, perhaps in the country would only be the second best, after the African Medical Centre. In fact, the same people who built the African Medical Centre in Abuja are the ones building our international hospitals. It is a 300-bed facility, world-class. We are going to have top-notch professionals who will manage it. We now have a tap running in most homes. We are not completely there yet, but we have every machinery in motion to ensure that our people have access to potable water. The same intervention we are doing in the city, we are also doing across the communities.
We have been intervening in about 130 communities where we did different kinds of water schemes. We are also pursuing the Open Defecation Free, ODF, by the end of the year. We are building toilets across our various communities because our target is to achieve ODF by the end of the year.
How do you raise the money for these projects? Can you also discuss the issue of tax?
The taxation thing that you hear is actually misplaced, but I have also committed to set up a committee that would include the market people, the civil society organisation, the non-governmental organisation, so that they can do a review of what is happening in our tax base, and then come up with a report.
We’ve not increased the tax rates. In fact, even under the laws, we are not able to do that because the issue of personal income tax or company income tax is a matter that is legislated by the National Assembly, and those rates can only be adjusted by laws made by the National Assembly. Of course you follow through the tax reform bill, which was recently signed into law and would become effective by the first of January. Those numbers were not legislated by the Enugu State House of Assembly. They were legislated by federal government. Even the waivers you now have for SMEs are all there
What we did that it is now being politicised, is we displayed some entrenched interests because we expanded our tax net, brought in all the payments. All the liquidities we had before in the system, we plugged them and ensured that payments are now made directly to government coffers. We now have e-payments, meaning the era of people going to market with paper or stopping or motorcycle or tricycle drivers, to give them this and that has gone.
Once you initiate policies or programmes like this, you are displacing some entrenched interests, and you are sure that they will fight back. They won’t go down just without fighting. I believe that this falsehood has been so narrated that if you have not done your own independent investigation, you may even be tempted to think that the narration is true, but that is not true.
But even as a leader, I believe that we need to probe further. It may be that there might be an element of truth, but let us do that, constitute that committee and do that review.
Revenue sources
We have mobilised quite a lot of revenue sources. I have just mentioned how we have been able to revamp a lot of our assets. And these were assets that were dormant, they were not bringing in money, but today they are all yielding revenue.
Hotel Presidential, the International Conference Centre, we have built five terminals. Do you know how much we make from those terminals? We have world-class terminals, five world-class terminals. We have procured CNG buses. We have airline. These are money-making investments. We had quite a lot of sectors that were dormant, we have been able to activate them. So we have largely mobilised our domestic revenue.
We are going to build on that. We expect that even the records we would see this year would be much better than what we saw last year. Hopefully, our target is we’re going to get to one of the top three states in terms of internally generated revenue.
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